Hiatus!

   Well, if you've been following our department blog you may have noticed we haven't posted anything for the last couple of weeks. We started out strong...but like a caterpillar munches on leaves and grows rapidly before taking a break with metamorphosis, we are in a quiet stasis mode before our next big change. The reasons? Lots!
   A.) We just closed the Exhibit Bugs Outside of the Box yesterday, which was one of the most successful exhibits we've had at the museum. The Opening was a great success in particular, thanks to all of the hard work of our volunteers, staff, and friends. It was a great run!

   B.) We've been really cranking along on cataloging our collection and accessions, including new donations of slides of Chironomidae flies thanks to Jan Hoover.

Chironomidae fly. Image from Wikipedia.com

A few weeks ago we also got a donation of over 2,000 or so slides of various aquatic insects and larvae from Lake Texoma as part of a survey by Dr. Gary Schnell, which need to be cataloged and accessioned. Its exciting to get all of this data, but cataloging the information is not the most exciting thing to write about. We did hit some important milestones, however. Thanks to Tamaki, Laura, and Jaime's help we've cataloged over 2,819 species of beetles in our collection...a great start for diversity represented for how small our collection is.
   C.) Our mollusk collection has moved! We had to move at least 12 cabinets to a new space so that we could incorporate the Mather shell accession into our collection. We keep growing! Having four women, three of which are under 5-5", move a hundred or so 15lb steel drawers filled with shell specimens is quite a task. Our team is a tough one!
   D.) 'Tis the season for...grant writing. The Sam Noble Museum has been very generous with our department, especially allowing us to expand our space by moving the mollusk collection. However, like most museums, major upgrades to collections and departments require outside funding to help cover the costs of revamping efforts. Our collection needs a major revamp with space and cabinets to keep pace with the accessions and quality standards we're facing, so we're working hard on writing grants this summer to see if we can make those changes possible.
      So, this summer we'll be a bit more sporadic with our updates as we write and catalog away, but don't worry, the next big thing for our department will on its way soon enough!

To Jump

    As I have mentioned in a previous post, spring is coming here in Oklahoma and several groups of insects are starting to come out. One of the more numerous groups of insects out there are the beetles (Coleoptera), and they are starting to creep out of their overwintering shelters or hatch out of their eggs for a brand new year!
    One of the beetles I saw starting to show up on campus here at the University of Oklahoma is a shiny green metallic and red flea beetle called Kuschelina gibbitarsa. It is part of a group of beetles called the flea beetles because they have a very strong "jumping" mechanism to get escape predators. If you look closely at these beetle's hind legs, you'll notice that the femora (longest parts of the leg, kind of like our femur) are really wide and "fat", because they have lots of muscles in there to help them push off into the air when threatened. These small to medium-sized beetles feed on plants, many beetles in fact feed on one or two types of plants only!

Examples of other types of flea beetles. Image by James Lindsey at Ecology of Commanster

      All flea beetles are part of the beetle tribe Alticini, named after the beetle genus Alticus. Altus in Latin means "high", which is in reference to their high jump. Other words that use "alt" like the Alticini are "altitude", "altimeter", etc. Actual fleas on the other hand, the Siphonaptera, do not get their name for their jumping but their siphon-like mouth parts and lack of wings (siphon+aptera, aptera meaning lack of wings). Fleas are much better jumpers than flea beetles (see a really neat article about flea jumping abilities here from the BBC), but flea beetles are still pretty impressive with how high and fast they can jump!
      So, if you're walking around campus this spring and you see something spring from a plant really quickly, it could be one of these flea beetles! Have a great weekend everyone!

Spring is Springing!

Our weather this month in Oklahoma has been funky, to say the least. In this state we're pretty used to huge swings of temperature in short period of time depending on which winds are strongest (warm from the south, cold from the north). They are so strong that, during the months of March-May, we have our annual Tornado season. We haven't had any tornadoes yet, but we did have a pretty nasty hail storm this past weekend. I won't go too far into weather patterns (we have a whole meteorology department here at OU for that, as well as the National Weather Service), or talk too much about global warming (its a fact...whether you believe it or not is up to you), but the fact of the matter is we've hit our Oklahoma spring, and hit it hard.
     The trees have started to bud-out, and the oakes have put out their pollen panicles...the start of flowers and leaves and plant growth for spring. This means that soon all the insects will also be out in full-swing, since many depend on the plants and trees for the first doses of nutrition to power the first generations of insects. This is especially true for groups of insects like aphids, and my study group of insects, the plant bugs (Miridae). Both depend on new-growth leaves and tissues to get the sugary sap, and nutritious plant-cells to grow and develop, so the temperatures and day light start triggering the overwintering eggs of these insects to hatch. Soon it will be a few weeks of boom or bust feeding, growing, dispersing, laying eggs, and then repeating.

Pine aphids. From Landscape IPM Advisory website at Utah State

      I took one of my volunteers out into the field behind the museum to show him the methods of collecting insects and what to expect for insects this time of year, and one of the most prominent bugs already out are massive swarms of aphids feeding on the pine trees. Aphids are interesting because they are one of the insect groups that have live-births (viviparity), and also have cloning (parthenogenesis). Especially in the spring, to take advantage of the plant growth and hopefully not have populations completely eaten by predators, there is pressure to produce as many aphids as possible and as quickly as possible. So, rather than wait around for a mate for sexual reproduction, many aphids will just clone copies of themselves in mass, producing huge populations of identical individuals. Later in the season aphids will switch to sexual reproduction and produce males and females, but right now on the pines its swarms of females.

Aphid reproduction. Image from San Fransisco State University Lab website.

         So, if you are walking around campus lately, take a look at the insects that are also coming out at the same time. I bet you'll see a few aphids, and soon the tide will start of all kinds of really neat and interesting insects starting their yearly cycle of life. Have a good week!

Science! In Action...

   This past week our department participated in Science in Action and Spring Break Escape, two outreach activities that work with kids in our state to learn more about science. The former is part of our museum's Newman-Whittman ExplorOlogy Program, the latter is by our Education Department.  
       Laura and Tamaki, our dynamic department duo, helped do the Spring Break Escape portion because I was in the field with the Science in Action team. They brought out specimen drawers from our collection to talk about our insects and other recent invertebrates, which as you know we have a lot of! It went really well, despite some events with the building that were unpredicted. Having them do the programing along with our two exhibits on spiders and insects is a great pairing.
      Science Escape is a program that takes elementary to middle-school age kids into Sutton Wilderness to learn about the scientific method and fieldwork. We [Jes and Kristi from the ExplorOlogy program, Jessa and I as science experts] first go to the schools and teach them about the scientific method. Then, once they learn the basics of it (observations; ask questions; develop hypothesis; test hypothesis; draw conclusions), we take them out into the field to make observations of the world around them at Sutton. There are 5 environments at Sutton that we take them to: woods, a pond (VERY dried out pond), lake, wetlands, then grasslands. While in the environments we have them look for the things that interest them or give them questions that they'd like to learn more about later. Once we wrap up our observations of the different environments at Sutton, we take them back to the museum to write down their observations in the field journals we give each kid for them to keep. This is followed by lunch, and then formulating questions in groups that they can develop a hypothesis and a experiment to test it with. Then we go back into the field and actually attempt to test the hypotheses, and then wrap up with program with drawing conclusions and answering any other questions about science or the scientific method.

Overview of Sutton Wilderness Park from the BioBlitz website

     We had four days of this program, with ages of the kids ranging from 3rd graders to 8th graders. Some of the more interesting questions we had included: what lives in holes; which habitat has the most frogs; and are there more insects in trees or grass. The kids had a great time looking for animals, and a lot of them really enjoyed just getting in the mud of the lake and pond and getting completely covered in dirt. Since some of the kid's groups are from inner-city OKC, many have never been in the field, so just getting outside was a joy for them. In the field over the 4 days we saw at least 3 species of frogs, a red-tailed hawk, lots of red-eared slider turtles, crayfish, ducks, snails, millipedes, lots of isopods (rolly pollys), cardinals, butterflies, beetles, etc. Many of these sightings were first for the kids. Personally, I'm really happy since many were into the insects and spiders: yay!
       Overall it was a lot of fun and I think we reached out to a lot of kids this week. Lets go Science!
        

Dung Beetles!

Hi everyone!

Lately I've been working with a certain type of beetle that gets a bit of a bad rap - the dung beetle. What do you think of when you hear about dung beetles? You're probably grimacing to yourself and thinking about beetles that spend all day swimming around in poo. Well, let me set the record straight - these little beetles are so much cooler and more helpful than that!

Dung beetles are in the family Scarabaeidae, which are the scarab beetles. Scarab beetles were a large part of the culture in ancient Egypt. Egyptians believed that scarab beetles with their balls of dung had a connection to the rising sun each morning.

Today, you might consider dung beetles as dirty, but they actually do a great job of tidying up the planet. After a large animal produces dung, the dung beetles roll up the dung into little balls, which they  roll by standing on their front legs and kicking with their back legs. They quickly roll the ball far away from the dung pile, and then burrow with it, "recycling" the dung for nutrients and to rear their young.

Dung beetles in action:

Here's a close-up photo of a dung beetle's incredibly strong front legs:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Scarabaeus_viettei_01.jpg

Dung beetles will fight over these dung balls, and other males sometimes try to steal them away, which is why the beetles roll the dung balls away from the original pile. Females do not do the rolling, but they will sometimes ride along on the ball to help keep it together.

Another interesting thing about these beetles use the Milky Way to figure out where they're going while they roll. They can also use the moonlight, but just this year a study reported that dung beetles could still figure out where they were going by orienting themselves to the stars. Here is more information about this study:

By breaking down dung in this way, dung beetles help increase soil health, as well as curbing some of the flies that would have been attracted to the dung pile for reproduction. If you should happen to see one rolling a dung ball, watch him - but let him go along his way.

Happy Friday everyone!

Science in Action and February Finds

   This past weekend was the first weekend in a while where there wasn't a museum related activity for members of our department, which was honestly a welcome break for us to spend time with our families and return to our non-bug-research related lives for a bit. However, the weekend before we had Science in Action and ID Day at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History on Sunday from 1-5pm. This event allows all of the departments in our museum to talk about their collections, research, and other activities while also having the curators there to help identify objects or specimens collected by Oklahomans. The most popular departments to visit during ID day are the Archaeology and Paleontology departments, since many people bring objects they believe to be fossils or arrowheads to have our experts look at. Other departments, such as ours or the other "recent" natural history departments (Ornithology, Herpetology, Mammalogy, etc.), usually get a few objects to identify but not a whole lot in comparison.
      Last year we had a lot of visitors with commercially purchased shells (such as shells bought for hermit crabs, shells you can buy while you're at the beach...etc.) that they wanted identified. Since neither myself or Laura is a malacologist (someone who studies mollusks), we did the best we could identifying what they had. We got to the mollusk family in most cases, but because a lot of the shells are exotic shells (from China, South East Asia), its even more of a challenge to figure out what they are because we only have guides to North America.

A selection of shells found at pet-stores for hermit crabs. Many are not what you'd normally find "as is" here in North America, making identification for us challenging!

    This year we had no shells (yay!), but only two arthropods. One was a small, dead jumping spider (Phidippus sp.) that was somewhat convenient because of our focus on spiders and jumping spiders in particular for our shows, and the other insect was a dead green lacewing (Chrysopus sp.). Both animals are out and about in late February probably because of the unseasonably warm weather out for a few days, and unfortunately also got hit with the cold temps again as Oklahoma see-saws its way through Spring and froze.
    Green Lacewings are able to survive in colder temperatures that most other insects can't tolerate here in North America, and are effective predators for other insects that are bad for crops, such as aphids. This is why they are commonly used for integrative pest management in many gardens and crops: they can be around longer than other insects to control pest insects in different growing seasons (spring, summer, fall, winter), and they are fairly easy to work with. If you are around lights during the night in spring and fall Green Lacewings are usually the first and last insects you'll see around, including here in Oklahoma.

Life cycle of Green Lacewings. From U.C. Davis IMP website (http://www.ipm.ucdavis.edu/PMG/NE/green_lacewing.html)

     I wonder what next year's event will bring! Please no shells, though!

Fly-tying recap; Science in Action

Hey everyone! Well, the weekend of the fly-tying course proved to be busier than I had planned, so I couldn't get to the recap of the class until now. Apologies!
    The purpose of teaching the fly-tying course at the Museum was two-fold. First, fly-tying is primarily based on entomology, which goes with our bug-themed exhibitions we're having right now. Fly-fishing is an art form in of itself, where you cast your line from the fishing rod to actively fish, hoping that the lures that you tied on your hooks and the action of your line mimic insects or other invertebrate prey enough to get a fish to bite. When people think of fly-fishing they normally think of salmon or trout fishing, but it also can be used for other local fishes in different streams and bodies of water. Here in Oklahoma most people fish for bass, but there are other fish that will be tempted by a well-tied fly and a well trained fisherman!

Example of an Adam's Dry Fly, mimicking a Midge. From Wikipedia.com

     As Andy Boswell, our entomologist and avid fly-fisher instructor, told us: fish are picky. Especially trout. If the lure doesn't act or look like a normal insect from the stream they are from, its unlikely that they will go after it. This is where entomology comes in, as he pointed out. If you are in an area that you plan to fish, it helps to investigate the water and environment around the river to see what insects are arriving and emerging from the water. That way, you can best mimic native insects the fish would eat when you tie your lures. For example, if only yellow mayflies are coming out of the river that you plan to fish and you have a ton of brown mayfly lures, you probably aren't going to fool the fish. Especially since its thought that fish can see color, so they do pay attention!

Andy teaching the class

   Andy taught our 18 students the main groups of insects that most fly-fishermen would come across to mimic for tying bait. Then he proceeded to show the class how to tie lures that mimic a beetle, a chironomid larvae, a caterpillar, an ant, and other insects. Since Andy is from Texas and has done a lot of fly-fishing in other states besides Oklahoma, he taught a lot of the general ties that can be catered to Oklahoma insects with small modifications. In total he taught about 4-5 flies, all of which each student had the opportunity to try out and take home their lure. I think will give our attendees a lot of success in their next fishing trips!
     We're hoping to continue teaching the class or at least having a more advanced class for those who came to this first class. The second reason we taught this course was to try to reach a different demographic of Oklahomans that normally wouldn't visit the museum, and I think we accomplished that. Most people that come to our museum are families: we are very successful at children's and family programming. However, there is a lot of areas we can improve on with adult programing, and this maybe is a neat way we can teach the science behind some of the popular nature sports in our state. Andy was a fantastic instructor and we hope to get him back soon, but we also are looking for native Oklahomans too that might have insight about Oklahoman insects if we continue this long-term.

Other students in the class tying away!

     The next big event for our department is Science in Action and ID Day, which is this Sunday. During this event we talk about our department, identify specimens people bring in, and promote our state's natural history. If you're in the area and have an artifact or specimen you'd like us to identify or to learn more about what is going on with science in our state, stop on by! Hope to see you there!